Posts tagged toeconomics

Data from eurostat puts the number of unemployment in the Euro area at 16 million in 2016, close to 10% of its population aged between 18 and 74 years of age. This is equivalent to the entire population of the Netherlands or 8 times the population of Paris. Clearly, the number of Europeans struggling on a daily basis is much higher than the official figure coming from the eurostat. This is because any person that works at least one hour per week is considered to be employed. The failure to consistently reduce… Read more

Should the British citizen choose to leave the EU structures, the whole process will take place gradually as per Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. Over the next two years parties will have to reach agreements on the conditions for the exit, otherwise the UK would return to the default position, when it comes to trade with the EU, as defined by the rules of the WTO The possible savings of not having to contribute towards EU structures for 2016 are expected to reach about £9.6bn (about $14.7bn). This amount… Read more

Companies House data demonstrates that more companies have been incorporated in the Greater Manchester region in the 21st Century than anywhere else outside of London. This appears to provide some evidence for the Chancellor’s siren calls of Northern England and particularly the North West becoming a power house of the UK economy, able to compete not only with London but internationally as well. Figure 1 shows the concentration of incorporations across the UK in recent years, it can be seen that Birmingham is also a hub of activity. On further… Read more

In the 1990s, Embraer and Bombardier identified a gap in the production of an aircraft sized for efficient operation in the regional jet market in Europe, Asia, Africa and, particularly, in the United States. Regional American airlines were increasingly demanding an aircraft designed specifically to serve markets that can be optimized with 37 to 110 seat capacity equipment. The production of Embraer Regional Jet-145 (ERJ-145) launched the company into the lucrative regional jets market in 1996, only two years after privatization. Prior to 1996, Bombardier was the sole player in… Read more

The public austerity program forced upon the Greek population by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (Troika) has depressed the economy instead of leading to an economic expansion, under the mantra of “expansionary austerity” policies. Five years of austerity involved drastic reductions in public expenditure, public sector redundancies and tax increases in the context of the worst global contraction of more than 60 years. As the Greek Prime Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, explained in a recent article published on the Project Syndicate website, the hard-line… Read more

A large number of European governments were keen to embark on the deregulation of the financial sector in the 1980s. The deregulation in Europe was initially proposed in the United Kingdom by the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and, subsequently, adopted by a large number of European governments. It opened up the doors to the addiction of European consumers to credit. Waves of bank loans and mortgages became available to consumers and it quickly turned into a necessity. Later on, it became clear that banking in Europe turned into a highly… Read more

The rate of unemployment is closely watched by the government as an important measure of success or failure of economic policies. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), unemployment in the United Kingdom declined from a peak of 2.65m in December 2011 to 1.84m in February 2015. Close to 800,000 workers found a job between December 2011 and February 2015. Additionally, according to BBC news, ONS also claims that “the employment rate now stands at 73.3%, the highest rate of people in work since the ONS began keeping records… Read more

Technological innovation, often regarded as ‘the great growling engine of change’, has long been synonymous with powering economic development. Equally, through necessity, industrial growth helps to drive innovation and the creation of new technologies. Thus in theory at least, both economic and technological growth feed off each other to sustain and accelerate development. Yet in recent years the opposite has been the case; the global economy has gone through the pains of a financial crisis at a time when patent applications, which are a reasonably good measure of the level… Read more

The Bank of Japan (BoJ) was the first central bank to adopt quantitative easing (QE) to fight the upsurge of a deflationary path in 2001. At that time, the feeble GDP reflected the collapse of aggregate demand following a financial crisis in the late 1990s. The most vicious side effect of a collapsing aggregate demand was a generalized decline in prices and production, which was already a reality in Japan at the beginning of the 2000‘s. In response to highly negative events, the BoJ launched the Quantitative Easing program (QE),… Read more

The pace of economic recovery in the Eurozone is yet to gain momentum. Real Gross Domestic Product, which is the gross income of the entire region, rose by 0.1% in 2013, following a decrease of 0.4% in 2012. However, according to the latest projections of the European Central Bank, “a gradual recovery in domestic and external demand is expected to be the driving factor behind the projected sustained increase in activity in 2014.” Let’s not forget that the financial crisis has had a permanent impact on the Gross Domestic Product… Read more